General Motors Futurama Concepts

City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

by Megan Kimble · 2 Apr 2024 · 430pp · 117,211 words

, Erik, 207–208, 215 Fundamental Law of Road Congestion, 16 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 22, 23–24 G Gaston, Jasmine, 152–54, 165, 233 General Motors (GM), Futurama at 1939 World’s Fair, 22, 23–24 George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet (Steffy), 69 Georgetown Climate

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead

by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman · 22 Sep 2016

vision, an artistic conception, which may undergo many changes as it develops into the great realities of tomorrow.” New York World’s Fair, “Futurama: Highways & Horizons,” 1939. Source: General Motors Figure 6.2 “Electricity may be the driver.” Driverless Car of the Future, advertisement for “America’s Electric Light and Power Companies,” Saturday

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-edge technologies such as television, electric street lamps, fluorescent lighting, and a new must-have device for emerging middle-class families, the automatic washing machine. GM’s bold exhibit, the “Futurama,” showcased an Automated Highway that by the year 1960 would make “hands-free, feet-free” driving the norm

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. GM’s Futurama exhibit consisted of a small-scale model of a typical American landscape of the near future. Fairgoers absorbed the scene from the vantage point of

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vision, an artistic conception, which may undergo many changes as it develops into the great realities of tomorrow.” New York World’s Fair, “Futurama: Highways & Horizons,” 1939. Source: General Motors During the ride, the Futurama’s narrator explained that by the year 1960, regular people would enjoy trouble-free personal mobility on automated

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roads and tiny cities would fascinate millions of people. In 1939, however, the American public was fascinated by GM’s utopian depiction of automated highways. GM’s Futurama, one of the most successful exhibits of the fair, attracted an estimated total of ten million riders. On some days, 28,000 people waited

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-free” cars would work, attributing their ability to guide themselves to some clever blend of radio and electronics. Perhaps it’s not surprising that GM’s Futurama was conceived not by engineers, but by legendary industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes was famous for creating fantastic movie sets and futuristic reinterpretations

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. Department of Transportation (USDOT); V2X FHA. See Federal Highway Administration Firebird, 121–122 Fleet learning, 102, 240 Fuel efficiency, 29, 30 Fukushima, Kunihiko, 214 Futurama, 107–110 General Motors Corporation (GM), 107–110, 116–120 Global positioning system (GPS), 10, 185–187 GM. See General Motors Corporation Google Google’s car accidents, 62

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

by Christopher B. Leinberger · 15 Nov 2008 · 222pp · 50,318 words

down on “the many wonders that may develop in the not too distant future . . . the wonderful world of 1960!” at the Futurama exhibit. (Source: Copyright 2007 GM Corp. Used with permission, GM Media Archive) The highlight of the fair was in the “The Highways and Horizons” exhibit, better known as Futurama (figure 1

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for international exhibitions has been met by permanent “world’s fairs” and amusement parks, such as EPCOT and Disney World, art biennials, and the Olympics. General Motors, Futurama brochure from the 1930–1940 New York World’s Fair, 1939. David Gelernter, 1939, The Lost World of the Fair (New York, NY: Free Press

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Magic Motorways is inscribed “To Jack in recollection of a tough job we did together, Norman, 14 March 1940.” Jack is John Dineen, the General Motors manager of the Futurama exhibit. E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1939. Lewis Mumford, “The Skyline in Flushing,” The New Yorker, July

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words

into another vehicle. Despite this early misstep, the auto industry continued to daydream about remote-controlled cars. At the 1939 World’s Fair, the Futurama exhibit by General Motors (GM) featured an enormous motorized diorama of an American city. Free-flowing highways plied by self-driving cars, trucks, and buses crisscrossed bustling districts of

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

by Peter D. Norton · 15 Jan 2008 · 409pp · 145,128 words

disinterested traffic safety experts outside of the ASF. 252 Chapter 9 Figure 9.5 At the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York, General Motors presented Americans with “Futurama,” a vision of the city of 1960. Norman Bel Geddes designed this enormous model, using his model for Shell as a starting point

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designers such as Clarence Stein and Henry Wright (the designers of the automotive new town of Radburn, New Jersey) or Norman Bel Geddes (designer of General Motors’ “Futurama”: its vision of the city of 1960 presented at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940). The most effective proponents of the motor

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Debbil Speed,” American City 51 (March 1936), 97. McClintock may not have chosen this title. 143. See the narration of GM’s Futurama, its 1939–1940 World’s Fair exhibit, in General Motors, Futurama (1939), a presentation edition of 1,000 issued Oct. 16, 1939. A copy is available at the Special Collections Library, University

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, Oct. 24, 1937. 30. “Exposition to Portray City of 1999,” National Safety News 39 (Jan. 1939), 74. 31. For a transcript of the “Voice,” see General Motors, Futurama (1939), a presentation edition of 1,000 issued Oct. 16, 1939. A copy is available in the Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work

by Iain Gately · 6 Nov 2014 · 352pp · 104,411 words

may even “sass” the policeman at the corner.’ Whether the phantom actually appeared or not is unknown. The next examples of autonomous autos materialized at General Motors’ Futurama exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which proclaimed that the teardrop-shaped model vehicles that streamed along its miniature highways would communicate

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the sense that they would be controlled by a traffic management system as well as by their drivers. The prediction was repeated in Futurama II (also sponsored by GM) at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In addition to clearcutting the rainforests to build model cities, mining the moon and turning

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility

by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness · 28 Mar 2010 · 532pp · 155,470 words

shift away from bicycles and mass transit toward the full-blown car culture previewed in the Shell Oil City of Tomorrow campaign (1937) and the General Motors (GM) Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, both designed by norman Bel Geddes.13 Futurama, which was part of the larger Highways and Horizons exhibit

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

by Tom Standage · 16 Aug 2021 · 290pp · 85,847 words

future. That future, based on the “free-flowing movement of people and goods,” would be built around the car. The exhibit was sponsored by General Motors. The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair depicted a utopian future built around cars and “magic motorways.” Futurama had been conceived by Norman

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, here surpassing of Ford, here and turn to sale of mobility services, here and used car trades, introduction of, here and World’s Fair Futurama exhibit, here, here General Motors Acceptance Corporation, here, here Good Road Show (Chicago, 1922), here Good Roads movement (U.S.), here Google, self-driving car program (Waymo), here

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift · 8 Jun 2011 · 423pp · 129,831 words

-distance, high-speed expressways to a degree that no government report, no matter how groundbreaking, could approach. McClintock was the technical adviser to " Futurama," the centerpiece of General Motors' " Highways and Horizons" exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair and far and away the event's top draw. The man receiving

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, 1939, to Pyke Johnson, copied to the Chief (Archives). [>] The man receiving...: Roland Marchand, "The Designers Go to the Fair II: Norman Bel Geddes, the General Motors 'Futurama,' and the Visit to the Factory Transformed," Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992); Robert Coombs, "Norman Bel Geddes: Highways and Horizons," Perspecta 13 (1971

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words

Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction I have seen the future. From April 30, 1939, to October 27, 1940, five million people walked through the doors of General Motors’ Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. As they left, they were each given a pin inscribed with those five words—and they believed

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became a common feature of the pulp science fiction of the time, and even made their way into seemingly more realistic visions of the future. General Motors’ Futurama exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York not only imagined millions more automobiles on the road and elevated pedestrian walkways to separate

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can derive value from it. This is a vision of mobility that is hostile to pedestrians in a different way than early automotive concepts like General Motors’ Futurama with its wide highways. Instead, even the sidewalk is imagined to be reoriented for other uses. At the same time as tech has been aggressively

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–3, 30 gated communities, 189–90 Gates, Bill, 52 General Electric (GE), 40 General Motors (GM), 21, 68, 69, 70, 72, 77–8, 80, 118 General Motors’ Futurama exhibition, 1–2, 118, 192 Ghosn, Carlos, 70 Gilder, George, 53 Gilliard, Chris, 195 Gingrich, Newt, 50, 53 Girma, Haben, 174–5 Glencore, 73 Global